All prizes Hungary
Libri irodalmi díj
Hungary · Since 2016 · For books in Hungarian
Awarded each May from 2016 to 2022 by the Libri bookshop chain to a book by a Hungarian author, first published in Hungarian the year before: fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs or other nonfiction. A jury of five chose the winner from a shortlist of ten.
The Libri bookshop chain founded the prize in 2016, as part of its programme to promote reading, to draw attention to the best of contemporary Hungarian fiction and nonfiction. Each year a longlist was drawn up from the previous year's books by Hungarian authors published in Hungarian, about 150 books from some forty publishers; a professional panel's votes reduced it to a shortlist of ten. A jury of five chose the winner from the ten, announced at a gala in May, while readers' votes decided a separate audience award. The prize was not given in 2023. Since 2024 Libri has given awards under the same name to the previous year's best-selling books in several categories, decided by sales figures rather than by a jury.
Libri 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“I See You”
Diána Vonnák · 31 when first published
Short stories · 218 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories set in a wide landscape from India and the Middle East to Ukraine and the Atlantic, about people who sense rather than understand each other and cannot find their place.
Libri 2022 · Shortlist
Mondatok a csodálkozásról
Edina Szvoren · 47 when first published
Short stories · 264 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Very short notes and seven longer stories about a horse's panic, the blind riding a chairlift, a video player brought from beyond the Iron Curtain, and a mother irritated by her son's hair.
Libri 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Horses in the River”
Imre Bartók · 36 when first published
Novel · 396 pages · Autofiction, Satire
AI-generated summary:A writer whose major novel failed and whose marriage has fallen apart retreats to the basement of a house full of odd tenants to settle accounts with his ambitions.
Libri 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Whale Song”
Krisztina Tóth · 54 when first published
Poetry · 64 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems written between 2017 and 2020, in three cycles that move from a valley road through a journey to China to the places of everyday life, on memory and the return of the past.
Libri 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Fiction 1 (The Cauldron)”
Márton Gerlóczy · 40 when first published
Novel · 382 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:In a small Sicilian town in a valley, as Christmas approaches, a writer awaits DNA results that may show that almost nothing he believed about himself and his family is true.
Libri 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Care”
Poetry · 88 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems that walk through churches, sports grounds and hotel lobbies, through cities and the wider natural world, where ruins of history and fortresses of power loom like allegories.
Libri 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Manège Makes Merry”
Tibor Bödőcs · 39 when first published
Novel · 212 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:In an absurd circus dictatorship, the ringmaster who seized power thirty years ago prepares to celebrate his jubilee, amid rose plantations, loyal media and critics silenced or abroad.
Libri 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“My Empty Place”
Novel · 220 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A writer looks back from hospital wards over his addictions, illnesses and recoveries, back to his birth in Debrecen and his youth, visited by characters he once made from his own relatives.
Libri 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“On Roses”
Novel · 472 pages · War, Politics
AI-generated summary:A rose gardener in Vojvodina retreats into the routines and rules of his work, while decisions about his country and his ill body are made without him.
Libri 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Bearded Neptune”
Ádám Nádasdy · 73 when first published
Short stories · 192 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Love stories about gay men: a Hungarian boy in England asks a policeman the way to a gay bar, a couple hides their relationship on a country outing, four naked men climb into the Trevi Fountain.
Libri 2021 · Shortlist
Haza
Andrea Tompa · 49 when first published
Novel · 480 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:Invited to a class reunion, a middle-aged writer who emigrated to New York thirty years ago travels back to the city of her youth, where no one is waiting for her anymore.
Libri 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Escape Exercise”
Anna T. Szabó · 48 when first published
Short stories · 274 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Stories of love and death, about body and soul, longing and loss, and whether passion can be tamed or love be anything but a matter of life and death.
Libri 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Manager”
János Háy · 60 when first published
Novel · 372 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:A businessman who dumped his first wife for a new woman and grew rich on property and consulting over thirty years of post-Communist Hungary sees himself as the hero of his age.
Libri 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“More About Myself”
Krisztián Grecsó · 44 when first published
Poetry · 148 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Poems that take stock of a life, about how our stories shape who we are, with a cycle on illness and poems on becoming a father.
Libri 2021 · Shortlist
Mély levegő
Rita Halász · 40 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:After a violent quarrel, a woman leaves her husband with their two small children and must decide whether to save her marriage or start again and learn to breathe freely.
Libri 2021 · Shortlist
Sándor Jászberényi · 40 when first published
Short stories · 318 pages
AI-generated summary:Fifteen stories that return home from the battlefields of the Middle East, about death and birth, friendship and letting go, loneliness in marriage and a childhood that takes its revenge.
Libri 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Unfathomable Landscape”
Tibor Noé Kiss · 44 when first published
Novel · 258 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:On a rainy night a young woman is badly hurt in an accident; her father, looking into what happened, meets a young woman raising her troubled teenage brother near the crash site.
Libri 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The First End of the World We Spent Together”
Short stories · 160 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories whose people, animals, victims and climate criminals face the end of the world with dark humour, crossing borders, fleeing war or sailing a suspiciously peaceful sea.
Libri 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Nowhere”
Ádám Bodor · 83 when first published
Short stories · 150 pages
AI-generated summary:Seven absurd stories set on the edges of the map, by a marshy river, on a meadow, in a prison or a real Romanian village, of funerals, betrayals and escapes.
Libri 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Here I Hang, Clearly Visible”
Ádám Nádasdy · 72 when first published
Poetry · 54 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems that speak like a friend confiding something unexpected, in which the reader learns something intimate about themselves.
Also: Aegon 2020 winner
Libri 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Poisoned Woman”
Eszter Babarczy · 53 when first published
Short stories · 256 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:Stories about becoming a woman, about the roles women are given and forced into, and about loneliness, vulnerability and the struggle for dignity and love at every age.
Libri 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“To the End of Our Lives”
Ferenc Barnás · 60 when first published
Novel · 456 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:A historian of philosophy, recovered from a breakdown, falls in love with a much younger woman, then learns too late of his mother's death and begins to suspect it was not cancer.
Also: Aegon 2020 shortlist
Libri 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Bullet That Killed Pushkin”
Gergely Péterfy · 53 when first published
Novel · 406 pages · Family, Love, Historical
AI-generated summary:An unusual love story that reaches back through twentieth-century Eastern Europe, with its passions, hatreds, friendships and betrayals, in a small town on the Danube.
Libri 2020 · Shortlist
Vera
Krisztián Grecsó · 43 when first published
Novel · 384 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In Szeged in 1980, a ten-year-old girl's safe life changes within weeks as she falls out with her best friend, is drawn to a new Polish boy and begins to sense her family's secrets.
Libri 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“White Wolf”
Krisztina Tóth · 52 when first published
Short stories · 126 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories of oppression, exclusion and violence told by nameless people we might meet in a lift or on the stairs, about lost homes, strange encounters and secrets that pull relationships apart.
Libri 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Hungarian Mermaid”
László Darvasi · 57 when first published
Novel · 204 pages · Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:In an imaginary German town in the Romantic era, a Hungarian mermaid brought in on a misty autumn day escapes and falls in love with a charcoal burner's son, while the townsfolk search for her.
Libri 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Ship in the Fog”
Pál Závada · 65 when first published
Novel · 416 pages · Historical, Family, War
AI-generated summary:In the spring of 1944 the heirs of Hungary's largest industrial empire, most of them of Jewish descent, argue over whether to stay or leave as their fortune becomes the price of survival.
Libri 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Newer Plays”
Béla Pintér · 48 when first published
Drama · 320 pages
AI-generated summary:Five plays written for an independent Budapest theatre company in the five years after the author's first collection, among them a longer version of one in verse.
Libri 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Those We Will Never Be”
Novel · 540 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:A fatal car crash near Iowa City in 1990, a young man's flight from Budapest to his teenage hometown in 2013, a sanatorium confession, and a 1956 protest that turns into a pogrom.
Also: Aegon 2019 shortlist
Libri 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“System Restart”
György Dragomán · 45 when first published
Short stories · 260 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Stories from fifteen years about systems, political, natural or technical, real or imagined, and about the chances people find to break out of them.
Also: Aegon 2019 shortlist
Libri 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Nile”
István Kemény · 57 when first published
Poetry · 88 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems that open with one river poem and close with another, between the Danube and the Nile, on history and the present, passing time and eternity.
Also: Aegon 2019 shortlist
Libri 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Luther's Dogs”
László Szilasi · 54 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:A writer in Szeged recounts surviving a brain tumour: a body that suddenly fails him, lost consciousness and time, the break-up of one family and the building of another.
Libri 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Foxes' Wedding”
Márton Simon · 34 when first published
Poetry · 106 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems like a recorded inner monologue, in which the line between the living and the dead blurs and a deer or a fox can wander into a sentence.
Also: Aegon 2019 shortlist
Libri 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Magnet Hill”
Réka Mán-Várhegyi · 39 when first published
Novel · 382 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:In 1999 a sociologist in her thirties returns from New York to Budapest, unable to write, and becomes involved with a star colleague who has affairs with his students.
Also: Aegon 2019 shortlist
Libri 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Blind Hope”
Zsuzsa Takács · 80 when first published
Poetry · 608 pages
AI-generated summary:The collected poems of a lifetime, opening with a new cycle and closing with old and new poems about India.
Also: Aegon 2019 winner
Libri 2018 · Shortlist
Egy dadogás története
Novel · 412 pages · Family, Autofiction, Historical
AI-generated summary:A writer growing up near Arad in Romania tells his own life and his parents', and those of earlier generations, between the Hungarian border and the Székely Land, to invent himself a homeland.
Also: Aegon 2018 shortlist
Libri 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Stone Frog”
György Spiró · 71 when first published
Novel · 246 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Kálmánka, born in a village that is on no map, wanders half the world and the Hungarys of several eras, is decorated without being brave, and spends time in a Budapest asylum.
Libri 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Goosebumps”
István Kemény · 56 when first published
Nonfiction · 228 pages
AI-generated summary:Essays from two decades on poets and poetry, art, history, politics, emigration, freedom and equality, fantasy and science fiction, Hungary and Europe.
Libri 2018 · Shortlist
Krisztián Peer · 43 when first published
Poetry · 76 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems of grief and death, about the impossibility of writing when the person who gave meaning to returning can no longer come back.
Libri 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Snack Bar of Being”
Lajos Parti Nagy · 64 when first published
Poetry · 248 pages
AI-generated summary:Poems written since 2000 by the poet's invented alter ego, a craftsman of existence who wanders from a hospital garden to the snack bar of being, elegies on language and life near death.
Also: Aegon 2018 shortlist
Libri 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“In Praise of Melancholy”
László F. Földényi · 63 when first published
Nonfiction · 336 pages
AI-generated summary:Essays on melancholy as a way of seeing the world from the inside out, a deep insight paired with ignorance that can hold sadness and cheer alike.
Libri 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“It Isn't Easy”
Ottó Tolnai · 77 when first published
Poetry · 380 pages
AI-generated summary:A collection of poems published in magazines from 2002 on, together with many new and unpublished ones.
Libri 2018 · Shortlist
Világló részletek
Péter Nádas · 75 when first published
Nonfiction · 576 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:A writer's memoir of his childhood and family in twentieth-century Budapest, built from vivid fragments of memory that he takes apart to recover the original experience.
Also: Aegon 2018 winner
Libri 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“At Least He's Not Drinking”
Tibor Bödőcs · 35 when first published
Short stories · 208 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Literary parodies by a stand-up comedian, in which the styles of famous Hungarian writers are turned to comic use.
Libri 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Worldview”
Nonfiction · 356 pages
AI-generated summary:A journalist draws on his life, encounters and reading to piece together a worldview, asking what love, freedom, family, good and evil mean in a world shaped by migration and conflict.
Libri 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Crash Test”
Anna T. Szabó · 44 when first published
Short stories · 244 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Stories about men and women in relationships, testing how much a couple can bear, who wins, and whether one person can possess another without breaking them.
Libri 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“What Went Where?”
Dániel Varró · 39 when first published
Poetry · 110 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Playful, strictly rhymed poems about a poet who is no friend to gardens, email or the telephone but loves children and family, and about what being a poet means to him.
Libri 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Marmot's Summer”
Novel · 208 pages
AI-generated summary:A novel that turns real experiences into fiction, keeping the closeness of a diary while telling one man's story of human conflicts that are also debated in politics and social theory.
Also: Aegon 2017 shortlist
Libri 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Orgy”
Gábor Zoltán · 56 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:In the last days of the Second World War, Budapest's fascist Arrow Cross militiamen carry out mass killings, and the story is told from their side.
Also: Aegon 2017 shortlist
Libri 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Autumn Campaign”
János Térey · 46 when first published
Poetry · 816 pages
AI-generated summary:A selection of thirty years of poems, many reworked, together with a book's worth of new ones, set in a mythical landscape of Debrecen, Budapest and Dresden.
Also: Aegon 2017 shortlist
Libri 2017 · Shortlist
Báró Wenckheim hazatér
László Krasznahorkai · 62 when first published
Novel · 576 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:A gravely ill baron with a gambling habit comes home from Buenos Aires to the run-down Hungarian provincial town where he was born, and where the locals await him like a messiah.
Also: National Book Award 2019 winner · Aegon 2017 winner
Libri 2017 · Shortlist
Egy piaci nap
Pál Závada · 62 when first published
Novel · 208 pages · Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:In May 1946, at the weekly market of a village on the Great Plain, women chase down and kill a Jewish egg trader, and a teacher's wife witnesses violence spreading through the community.
Libri 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Salt of Life”
Péter Nádas · 74 when first published
Nonfiction · 116 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:An essay on how a small town in southern Germany came into being, told through its history and customs, about how private interests and slow spiritual change combine into lasting change.
Libri 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Thick-Skinned Mimosa”
Ádám Nádasdy · 68 when first published
Nonfiction · 164 pages
AI-generated summary:Short writings on gay men and on being gay, about love, desire and the courage to speak of them openly.
Libri 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“No Live Files Remain”
András Forgách · 63 when first published
Novel · 246 pages · Family, Politics, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:In 2014 a man learns that his mother was recruited as an informer by the Hungarian secret police in 1975, and sets out to understand her secret life from her file.
Libri 2016 · Shortlist
A vége
Attila Bartis · 47 when first published
Novel · 600 pages · Love, Politics
AI-generated summary:In a small town in Communist Hungary, a boy loses his mother and moves to Budapest with his father, where he grows up to become a photographer whose life is driven by images and by love.
Also: Aegon 2016 shortlist
Libri 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Country's Best Hangman”
Edina Szvoren · 41 when first published
Short stories · 186 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Stories of strange, close relationships: the country's best hangman moves in next door, a mother may see her child only at feeding times, someone lives with a shop dummy.
Also: Aegon 2016 shortlist
Libri 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Lion Choir”
György Dragomán · 42 when first published
Short stories · 250 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories in which music, from jazz and heavy metal to a Viennese waltz, helps people overcome fear and grief, bear the pain of love and longing, or find a home in a foreign country.
Also: Aegon 2016 shortlist
Libri 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Smallest Ice Age”
János Térey · 45 when first published
Novel · 624 pages · Speculative, Politics
AI-generated summary:In 2019, volcanic eruptions in Iceland plunge Europe into a sudden cold, and a Hungarian consul evacuated from Reykjavík returns to a Budapest sliding into a volcanic winter. A novel in verse.
Also: Aegon 2016 shortlist
Libri 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Hungarian Occupation Troops in the Soviet Union, 1941–1944”
Krisztián Ungváry · 46 when first published
Nonfiction · 468 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:A history of the Hungarian troops who occupied more than half a million square kilometres of Soviet territory in the Second World War, and of the partisan war and Holocaust they took part in.
Libri 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Ankle-Deep in Champagne”
Pál Réz · 85 when first published
Nonfiction · 368 pages
AI-generated summary:A spoken memoir in which a veteran literary editor recalls, in conversation with a poet, the Hungarian writers and poets he worked with and befriended over six decades.
Also: Aegon 2016 shortlist
Libri 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Guilty One”
Péter Esterházy · 65 when first published
Novel · 80 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:A short book written alongside a painter's watercolour diary, in which a writer who once promised murder stories to go with the pictures ends up telling the story of a single killing.
Also: Aegon 2016 shortlist